The Michelle Obama Cell-Phone Portrait Session

It seems to me that many commentators are missing the broader meaning of the brouhaha over the photo of a soup kitchen cell-phone portrait session with Michelle Obama. Those who read into that photo either a contradiction or the irresponsibility self-evident in owning a cell phone while accepting help in a soup kitchen and food pantry, who saw a confirmation of their disdain for the poor and for programs that minister to them, are simply participating in a wide-ranging long term American campaign. Some various elements of the campaign with which you may be familiar include pointing out the obesity of the poor, John Galt, Rick Santelli and his Chicago Mercantile cohorts’ tirade against “losers”, the justification of obscene CEO compensation packages, the welfare cadillac, and NY Times stories about the tragedy of a former executive working as a janitor. At its root, that campaign advances the understanding that economic well-being is perfectly correlated with personal worth, that being poor, should, in and of itself, be a source of shame, is due solely to irreducible personal failings. In order to accomplish this, though, those who pick up the threads of the campaign need to ignore any countervailing evidence: structural elements of the economy, prejudice, inequality of opportunity and education. It must ruthlessly ignore that the predominant CEO compensation mechanisms are subject to positive feedback distortions, that the businesses operating in poor neighborhoods, agricultural and corporate policies, and rational decisions about how to convert money into calories conspire in determining the diet of the impoverished, that wealth can be built with activities that are not only unproductive but counterproductive to social welfare, and the role and economics of cell-phones in 2009 (not to mention a lack of any semblance of reportorial due diligence in examining the context of a particular photograph). And with this as a backdrop, it is trivial to look over the shoulder of a young black man, scornful of how he has (apparently) chosen to spend his money, secure in the superiority of our own money management, our own net worth, the content of our character.